For most students here in Melbourne, life feels confined to a repetitive loop: a city where people pass by the same three main tourist attractions every day to the point they just fade into the background. This repetition creates a sense of stagnation, where the world beyond city limits exists only in textbooks and online images rather than lived experience.

These limitations, though, can be challenged through Education First (EF), which is an educational organization that provides students with opportunities to participate in global trips involving learning and cultural encounters. At West Shore, these trips are coordinated by teachers Athena Pietrzak and Alexandra Stewart. Students have had the opportunity to go everywhere, from European countries like Germany and Switzerland to Asian countries like Japan. Despite this wide selection, fewer than 20 students at this school take advantage of these international tours every year, underscoring the lack of awareness of this program.

These EF trips deserve more attention and promotion because their lifelong value for education often goes unrecognized. At such a small and academic-oriented school, it is only right that students should have experiences beyond the mundane classroom learning environment. The tours also include students from other schools, such as Satellite and Melbourne High School. This encourages personal growth on a local and global level as students make memories with peers from different schools while experiencing the culture of countries.

Embarking on these travels allow for students to experience mesmerizing atmospheres beyond textbooks which include visiting historic landmarks, interacting with people from different cultures and experiencing overall daily life in other countries. As a result, these tours can shape cultural awareness and appreciation whilst changing student thinking and how they perceive academic interest and individual goals.

With such knowledge acquired, students are elevated in their cultural comprehension and expand their worldviews beyond typical American lifestyles. This could lead to more students involved with multicultural clubs from all around the world, fostering student collaboration and diversity throughout the campus. This would benefit student life and make the atmosphere feel more inclusive, as shown by one study where students in a pre‑college study‑abroad program increased their scores in the “acceptance” stage of intercultural development by 13 percent and the “adaptation” stage by 7 percent after traveling abroad.

Senior Kyle Blair, who attended the Summer 2023 EF tour to France and the United Kingdom, initially “thought it would just be sightseeing.” However, once immersed in the environment, Blair found that “being there and experiencing it in front of [his] eyes made everything feel real,” which underscores the contrast between passively viewing landmarks in a textbook and engaging with them firsthand. His experience reflects a broader realization among students that traditional classroom instruction often lacks the depth that real-world exposure provides. As Blair later noted, the trip “definitely changed how [he] see[s] the world and what learning can actually look like,” an impact so meaningful that he described the experience as “truly irreplaceable” and expressed a desire to participate in another EF tour if given the opportunity.

In order to turn these trips into a reality for students, action has to be taken. Increasing EF publicity will increase the likelihood for more fundraising opportunities, group discounts or even attracting donors. Furthermore, earlier notice of these tours will allow for students and families to save and plan accordingly as well as contributing to fundraising efforts. If the continuous lack of awareness continues, more and more students will miss out on these memorable educational experiences since they don’t realize such a program even exists.